Talk:Constantin Tănase

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[edit] German-language site

I ran across what looks like an interesting German-language discussion that touches several times on Tănase: http://www.karpatenwilli.com/gaeste09.htm. It's in backward chronological order. It led me to a few tidbits (like that he'd made movies). Because it is long, in German, and is only tangentially about Tănase, I didn't think it would make a useful link in the article, but it may have some further material that would be useful for a researcher. If anyone can explain to me the thing there about the censor and substituting Musca-Cioara for mustacioara, I'd appreciate it; I'm sure this is based on secondary meanings of these words, and my Romanian is not fluent. -- Jmabel | Talk 04:08, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

Looked at it a little more. There is what looks like an excellent anecdote giving an alternate account of his death. I'll do my best with that, but someone with better German and/or Romanian should feel free to correct me. -- Jmabel | Talk 04:26, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)
Musca-Cioara = Fly-Crow; mustacioara = little moustache. If there is any reference to Hitler, that could be it (Hitler beeing famous (between other things) for his short moustache).MihaiC 19:41, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The theory of life

Teoria mea-i uşoară
Toată viaţa e o scară
Care, pe rând, ca şi la moară
Toţi o urca şi-o coboară".

Jmabel's traslation:

Theory is hard for me
All life is a staircase
Which, by turns, death is as well
All a climb and a descent.

A more literal translation would be:

My theory is easy
All life is a staircase
Which, by turns, just like at the mill
Everyone climbs and descend

I'm not sure, however, what he means by "like at the mill". Bogdan | Talk 21:56, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

In Romania most mills used to be watermills and he must be referring to the movement of the water wheel. Bogdan | Talk 08:28, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Swearing

Şi când înjuri pe şleau de mamă
Ei, cică, eu fac pe nebunul.
And when I swear openly on my mother
They say I'm taking them for a fool.

er.. He's swearing not about his mother, but about their mother. :-)

  • So he's not swearing on his mother, as one would swear on a Bible? Feel free to correct in the article, obviously I'm out of my depth here. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:27, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
Please note that there's a small difference between 'a jura' and 'a înjura'. :-)
a înjura = A spune cuvinte injurioase sau de ocară la adresa cuiva; (to curse)
a jura = A afirma, a declara ceva sub jurământ, a depune un jurământ. (to vow) Bogdan | Talk 22:04, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Yes. In English "to swear" is the most common for both. "To vow" is a bit archaic. "To curse" is in common use, but still not as common as "to swear" even for that meaning. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:47, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
Jur pe mama or Jur pe mormantul mamei = I swear on my mother('s grave). a înjura de mama = the most offensive swearings in Romanian language, like I f*** your mother or to send someone to his origins.MihaiC 19:41, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

also:

A face pe nebunul = a-şi acorda o importanţă exagerată, a fi mereu mândru, cu nasul pe sus, nemulţumit.

But I don't know how to translate in English. (Bogdangiusca's unsigned comments Feb 12, 2005)

  • Not sure I'm having any easier time with your explanation that with the original, but maybe "to look down on someone"?
Actually it has both the meaning of "dissenter" and of "to look down on someone". Maybe it's close to "disdainful dissenter". Bogdan | Talk 22:04, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • I'm sorry, I'm really having trouble even teasing out the subject and object in that last line. (What can I say, 6 months in a country is not enough to learn to decipher tricky syntax.)
Wow. You learnt it in just 6 months! Bogdan | Talk 22:04, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • Is "ei" or "eu" the subject?
"Cică" appears to be a strange mix of an adverb and a verb. :-) Anyway, I think both are subjects. Bogdan | Talk 22:04, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

And "cică" is just sort of an aside, right? -- Jmabel | Talk 19:50, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)

Cică can mean "alleged", "it is said" or "they say". In this case it is indeed the last version. Bogdan | Talk 22:04, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
So is it "they say I'm looking down on them"? But that's not very far from what I had, "They say I'm taking them for a fool." Or maybe "They say I'm taking them for fools"? But it was the singular in Romanian, and that's not un-colloquial in English. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:53, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
"A face pe nebunul" means something like "seeing oneself as more important than in reality".
"Lor ce le pasă cum e trăiul" = Literally, "To them, what do they care how good the living is." i.e. "They don't care how good the living is". bogdan 09:35, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
A friend who is an authorized translator tells me that a better translation is " to play the fool" MihaiC 19:41, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup?

Someone recently added a "cleanup" tag to this article, but without indicating what they though needs cleanup. If no one identifies a specific problem in the next couple of weeks, I'm removing the tag. - Jmabel | Talk 06:01, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Davai ceas

Recent edits make the matter of the phrase Davai ceas more complicated than it needs to be: "(davai - Russian for 'Give me', and ceas - Romanian for 'watch')". Well, yes, but since the Russian and Romanian for "watch" are essentially the same (the Russian is часы, a slightly different vowel sound), it is equally accurate (and simpler) to say "Russian for 'Give me [the] watch'" (Russian lacking a definite article). Maybe we should say "Russian for 'Give me the watch'", and also remark that the Russian and Romanian for 'watch' are nearly the same word? Because as it is, this is just too complicated for something so simple. - Jmabel | Talk 01:51, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

On one hand, it's true "Davai ceas" could be actually the Russian original which inspired Tănase. On the other hand, Tănase further develops it into "Davai ceas, davai palton, Davai ceas, davai moşie" where obviously "davai" is a Russian verb, while all the others are Romanian nouns. So depends on what do you expect the English translation to illustrate: the origins of "davai ceas" or the aesthetics of the poetry, you can choose one version or another. I choose the latter, but I'm willing to concede if other editors have strong feelings against it. Daizus 09:33, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
On a second glance, actually from "davai ceas" as a Russian saying (in opposition with the German one) it is developed into the enumeration I had illustrated above. So perhaps the best it would be to point out the "ceas" as a common word between Russian and Romanian. Daizus 09:39, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
Also, to rhyme with das, one would presumably have to pronounce the word with the Russian vowel, not the Romanian one. - Jmabel | Talk 02:49, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
In the Romanian "ceas", "ea" is an ascending diphthong and the "e" sound is short and unstressed. I believe the ryhme works with Romanian pronounciation (after all, the word is transliterated by the Romanian equivalent). Daizus 07:38, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, easily gotten away with, I'm sure. But the "ceas" spelling, when writing this in Romanian, is simply inevitable. One would hardly write "cias" and expect anyone to read it correctly. - Jmabel | Talk

[edit] Birthplace

According to the Jurnalul Naţional article (Constantin Tănase: A căzut cortina! ("Constantin Tănase: The Curtain Dropped!")), Tănase was born in Bârlad, while IMDB states Vaslui. However, I incline to the Jurnalul source, since IMDB also mentions Berlin as place of death and I don't think the Russians would have bothered to murder him in Berlin when it would have been easier anyway to do it in Bucharest. Does anyone have any other sources? Thanks. Mentatus 12:35, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

I researched last night the matter of Constantin Tănase's last days and death, for the Soviet occupation of Romania article, since I think his cabaret act ("Davai ceas, davai palton") is iconic for that period. So I came over that article in Jurnalul Naţional, which seems the best one to lay out the various theories regarding Tănase's end. I'm much more inclined to go with this article than with what IMDB says -- that stuff about murder in Berlin sounds like an urban legend to me, and so should be discounted (or simply mentioned as an aside, as it is now done). It would be good to have another source, but basically everything else I found was gibberish. My hunch is that one needs to go back to articles from that time -- is there an archive where Romanian newspapers from around 1945 would be preserved? (I assume that none have been digitalized yet.) Turgidson 12:59, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

You're right, the sources about Tănase on the internet are rather scarce and going back to the articles from that period is probably the last option left (maybe some wikipedians living in Romania are able to help). Also the book mentioned in the article ("Constantin Tănase" by Ioan Massoff and Radu Tănase) might prove interesting, although, taking into account the times when it was written, I'm sure it didn't cover all aspects and it'll leave many questions unanswered. And last but not least, good point - Constantin Tănase's fate is a good example of what the so-called Russian/Soviet "liberation" brought upon the Romanians. Mentatus 13:16, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Deleted source

Sorry to disagree, but there are certain rules for WP:ATTRIBUTION. The German source about killing of Tănase is unfortunately invalid. It is a collection of private letters from persons of unknown credibility to the owner of the website with personal remarks and memoirs. They cannot be considered relliable sources in wikipedia. Mukadderat 16:47, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

There was already a discussion about this source and its reliability, on this very page, just see above. The author of this article, in accordance with other main editors has deemed this source as reliable, and so it stood all the way long. It will be quite hard for you to impose your POV about the unreliability of this accepted source. Do you really think it’s worth ? Can you make me understand what your real point is ? Please don’t invoke WP policies, since policies are created in order to foster creation of good and informative articles and not to hinder reasonable editing. I really don’t see your point. Is it something behind all this? Are you an edit warrior? Please don’t feel offended, but do you have any idea of Constantin Tănase ? Can you read German ? Are you familiar with the (hi)story of the creation of this article ? This is a more complex and intricate story as you probably guess. If you are just trying to coach some users on wiki policies, I am afraid that this is the wrong place to do it. If you really are willing to help improving this work, you are welcome, but please don’t start with deletions. It is not the best way to cultivate team work. --Vintilă Barbu 17:41, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
Please don't assume I am a vandal or idiot before looking into my contributions. I touch edits related to Romania because Romania has connections with Ottoman Empire, and I occasionally read Romania-related articles, out of curiosity. And I sometimes fix problems in them when I see it. Yes, I've seen the talk above. It was more than two years ago when rules about citing sources were not so cleanly defined; wikipedia is still young an evolving. By the current policies, texts from unknown people are not valid sources for wikipedia, plain and simple. My grandfather may tell many interesting things about 1900s and my son may post it on his university website. But this will not make them reliable sources. Likewise, I don't see why you yuorself shall feel violated: the paragraph in question is already referred to from a source valid by wikipedia's rules, so relax and don't look for enemies where there is none. We all working on improving of wikipedia. To make you feel better I asked at User talk:Jmabel for additional input. May be he will have arguments that I am wrong. Mukadderat 22:08, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

I have to agree that Wikipedia has evolved policies and guidelines that reject this sort of source. I have not been happy with that evolution: my feeling is that those of us who clearly know our subject matter should be given more latitude to evaluate our sources; you will note that from day one I qualified this in the article with "another website gives a circumstantial account of his death that has the ring of truth", a phrase that I see has now been removed. My feeling is that this is part of what scholars do, and that the move away from this is a move toward a rather screwed up epistemology that seems to assume that one can algorithmically identify good sources and mechanically generate encyclopedia articles. I fully understand the need to protect Wikipedia from crackpots and from people with an axe to grind. I would comfortably say that any reasonable examination of any random subset of my 55,000+ edits will show that I am neither of these. However, as I said in the beginning, yes, it seems that this is the way Wikipedia is headed. I think it makes it less interesting and less useful, but that is not a battle to fight at the level of an individual article and, indeed, my disagreement over this is why I have not been giving it even half of the time I used to. In short, "in the small", Mukadderat is correct about rejecting the source. "In the large", I disagree strongly.

At the time I wrote this the (oddly undated) article from Jurnalul Naţional was not available. I'd be interested in knowing when it dated from. Being from a major newspaper, our rules let us cite it as a reliable source, but it wouldn't astound me if they actually used us as an unacknowledged source, or used the same German-language source I used. Vintilă, do you have any insight into when this first appeared? I tried searching the Internet Archive, but they haven't archived the page at all. - Jmabel | Talk 22:35, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

If I may, let me interject a couple of observations. First, I wondered the same thing about the Jurnalul article last night -- before quoting it (for another article), I wanted to put the date, but could not find it. A bit strange -- and unprofessional about Jurnalul, if I may say so. Second, I'm 99.99% sure that the verses as rendered here (Davai ceas, davai palton, etc) are correct. As I grew up, they were simply part of the oral tradition -- quite risqué to utter, especially the part about De la Nistru pân' la Don -- but in the privacy of the family, perhaps with water running to drown putative bugs, they were passed on. Now, about the circumstances of Tănase's death, I'm much less sure. There were hushed rumors about what happened as a consequence of his courageous stance, but of course nobody knew for sure. By the way, that's why I changed the category today from "dissapeared people", which sounded very odd -- that whole story about the Berlin dissapearance just doesn't make sense, pace IMDB -- and replaced with "Cause of death disputed" which seems to reflect accurately the present state of affairs (and also gibes with what the Jurnalul article says). Finally, I very much agree with that local vs global point of view that Jmabel brings up. Though still relatively new around here at wiki, the more time I spend, the more I realize the potential for discrepancy between the two -- mercifully, not always, but when the various desiderata clash, it's quite frustrating. I have no magical solution to propose, except to remind everyone the words of wisdom of Sir Winston, from his Iron Curtain speech (one of my favorite speeches ever, I must confess): "Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Turgidson 23:09, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

I've updated the reference with the dated article. Mentatus 08:03, 29 March 2007 (UTC)


the chronology of the Tănase’s death report, as it appeared on the www.:
  1. 5th February 2003, German report
  2. 4th November 2005, rowiki report very similar to the German report, however not naming any source
  3. 20th January 2006, enwiki report explicitly naming its source (the German report)
  4. 15th January 2007 article in “Jurnalul Naţional”

All four reports are highly similar. There is no mention of this version of Tănase’s death previous to February 2003’s version. For further details, see also this post --Vintilă Barbu 10:19, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Interesting chinese whispers story :) Maybe it would be worth asking Paula Mihailov Chiciuc where did she get the story from. Anyway, similarly to Turgidson, I also heard the story about Tănase’s death and his "Davai ceas" and "El tic-eu tac" sketches from my father when I was a kid. His courage to say the truth (even jokingly) and his fate gave him a hero aura in a period when telling the truth was a thoughtcrime. Mentatus 13:21, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

As I said in the first place: "The ring of truth". I don't think there is any question about "Davai ceas" (very characteristically Tănase, and, I gather, rather well-known), and not the slightest doubt at all about him living well into the Soviet Occupation. "El tic-eu tac" seems perfectly likely, and again reasonably characteristic, but could imaginably have been someone's later invention (but, again, it seems very plausible). The exact mode of his death: clearly unknown, probably always will be, but almost certainly at the hands of the Soviet Occupation forces or possibly the local Communists.

The chronology above does not surprise me. It seems to me that intellectual honesty means that we credit not only the "officially reliable" source, but also the earliest known source. But, I suppose, we have effectively done that on this talk page. In any case, it would be interesting to trace any of the steps along the way and ask people what was their source: I seem to be the only person in the chain who acknowledged mine. - Jmabel | Talk 16:18, 29 March 2007 (UTC)